Mosaics

I recently started my first foray into Lego mosaics. I don't have the bricks (or the money) for giant wall-sized ones, so I'm starting smaller. On a 32x32 baseplate, to be exact.

At that scale, large images don't translate well down into 1024 total "pixels". A 32 x 32 baseplate is 10 inches square, and an LP cover is 12 inches. So I'm also starting smaller with my mosaic sources. The baseplate covers 70% of the area of an album cover, so the artwork is (mostly) recognisable when reduced down to a highly pixelated version.

Below are two work-in-progress examples.

With all these albums I'm currently translating into Lego form, I used the same process.

First, I downloaded a decent-sized (at least 1000 pixels) square image of the album cover. Then in Paint I resized it to 32 by 32 pixels. Zooming in gave me an idea of what a 1024-pixel mosaic would look like.

Of course, my colour palette using bricks is fairly limited, so while still in Paint I retouched some pixels so that instead of fifty shades of grey, I was using the easily available white, light grey, dark grey, and black.

I then built a digital version of the mosaic in Digital Designer. From here I was able to "build" using optimal brick configurations, as not all brick sizes come in all colours. Then I generated a list of parts needed. As I sort by colour, it was a fairly easy process to go through my buckets of bricks and grab all the pieces I already had. I had nowhere near enough to complete even one of my mosaic designs, but I still saved myself hundreds of dollars of BrickLink or Pick-a-Brick orders.

I've done a few BrickLink orders so far (as I've got time and money) and will have to do a few more before I get close to completing my first dozen album covers. I can't wait to display them here!